How to write blog post in 60 minutes?

As of today, I have 5 websites in different niches. I don’t outsource articles for any of them. The main reason is simple – I simply love the subjects of my websites. Passion sometimes makes up for the lack of knowledge in a particular subject.

I research, I write, I am happy.

But, as you might imagine – this takes up a LOT of time. With a day job that keeps me out for 10-14 hrs, I find it hard to write on a daily basis (I do try). The next best thing of course is to write on weekends, and completely ignore family and friends. Though I am partially successful in doing that, I get a lot of heat because of that.

I cannot compensate for lack of posts, or lack of content in my posts. This is the only thing that will matter when I am building up readership. No content = no readers.

So, one thing that keeps me up in the night is the content that I have to write for the week. There are a lot of weeks where I have missed this, and my empty content calendar never forgets to stare back at me with an accusing look.

Since the current situation could not go on for ever, I devised a method to write one post within 60 minutes. Along with the 60 min article, I went back and revisited my content strategy for all my websites:

My technology website that deals with nuances of a popular enterprise software product will get the least love. That takes the most time. Although that is fairly easy since my day job is around it, lately I am not doing a lot of technology and fresh research for software products (e.g. new ways to do things, best practices) etc. will take time. There are articles that have taken more than 4 hrs since I had to set up the environment for the problem, implement solution, and record everything.

My web content, make money online website will get one article per week

Three other niches will get five articles each per week. Those are experiments that I do during early mornings, and weekends, and they do not take as much time. So there is enough to share

This speeds up things by more than a bit. A solid plan simplifies the execution process.

All I had to do now was to improve my writing speed. There was no way I could spend more than 2 hours per post and still get everything done.

How to write blog post in 60 minutes?

I follow the below process to write quick articles and posts.

First up, when I say write something quickly, that does not imply that I ideate in that time. I keep my eyes and ears open throughout the week and jot down possible material for my own posts. The notes are in the form of scribbles on my phone using Google Keep, or in some cases, a mind map.I cannot really stress the importance of the above point. Without ideation there is no humanly possible way to write quick posts.

I start to write knowing what exactly the topic is about, my opinion on what should or should not happen, and what is the end message to readers. I just use WordPress editor for writing posts.

The writing process is simple enough –

Write header – spend at least 2 minutes here, sometimes less. Revisit at the end of the post

Write the leading piece. I lay down what exactly am I talking about in the post. This may be a problem statement, or the current situation

Now start the core part of the article. Introduce opinions, ideas or anything that the article is about.
Write at least 500 words with 2 headers. I do not like headers showing up everywhere. Write a paragraph of 2-3 sentences in conclusion. By this time, I typically exhaust 30-35 minutes

I spend the next 10 minutes looking for images, videos, external links that are relevant to the post. I revisit some parts of the post to make sure I maintain harmony throughout the article. This takes 20-25 minutes

Reserve the last 5-10 minutes for review. This is surely not enough, but has to do for the time being. There have been days when the drafts stay like that for at least 2 weeks, while I play around the messaging part in my mind and visit the posts on evenings or weekends

I have found that the 60 minute posting game plan works as planned for specific niches, but not for everything. For example, no matter how many ideas I have on paper – I still take a lot of time in finalizing the post. This post has taken me more than 50 minutes to arrive at this point, and the clock is still ticking!

Content is indeed of prime importance, and the method helps me generate just enough to keep readers engaged and not abandon me.

Next, I have found that my reviews are critical of me. Although there are lot of places I have hit the publish button too soon, I take a really long time for reviews and corrections if I don’t have a time-limit set for myself. Yes, the reviews improve quality but no, the excellent quality will not rank me now in Google.

Right now I am following a strategy of filling in articles at the rate of 3+ a week. In the future I will go back to writing one post a week with all my energy. At that time I am hoping to build up sufficient readership who are also going to be a huge encouraging factor to aim for higher quality.

In Conclusion

You see that I have not introduced anything magical about the 60 minute writing process. All I did was to bring structure to whatever I followed for as along as my blogs existed.

This structure and the time-limit helped to look at the content creation process in an objective manner. At the end of the day, I do want to write great articles. But, without readership that is not going to take off anywhere. I hope that this structured writing process over next 5-6 months will build up enough meet here and in other websites for good rankings, and only then the real fun of engaging with a big reader base starts.

You can also note that you can follow the same process when you have been outsourced article writing. Learn more about this, and many more article writing techniques in my Content2Cash course.